A loose confederacy of misfits

Posted Friday evening, April 21, 2017.

In the late fall of 1967 and into the winter of 1968, James Earl Ray was living in Los Angeles having drifted there after he’d escaped from prison in Missouri but before he’d developed his plan to murder Martin Luther King. And it was probably in L.A. that he determined to kill King because while he was there he became, as Hampton Sides says in his riveting account of King’s assassination and the international manhunt for his killer that followed, Hellhound on His Trail, “infatuated” with George Wallace’s campaign for president. Ray was good at blending in among more or less respectable people, and while he sometimes struck others as a bit odd, he didn’t come across as an obvious psychopath. But if he had, it’s likely few of the other Wallace supporters he rubbed shoulders with would have noticed, since a great many of them were more than a little odd themselves. California was not Wallace country, at least not the parts of it that would be voting in the Democratic primary in June of ‘68 and Wallace was putting in an effort than mainly to show the media and his Southern and Rust Belt supporters he had a more national appeal. He was also probably hoping to embarrass the librul likes of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey by making a strong showing in what was supposed to be their bailiwick. But he didn’t have the money or the organizational staff to spare to mount a real campaign there, mostly what he was aiming for was just to get on the ballot which was a tall order in itself. Consequently, the California campaign organization had to make do with whatever sort of volunteers they could get. (Yes, there really was someone working for Wallace with the last name Turnipseed.):

The grunts who volunteered for the Wallace Campaign in Los Angeles were an odd assortment of mavericks, xenophobes, drifters, seekers, ultra-right-wingers, hard-core racists, libertarian dreamers---and outright lunatics. The Wallace movement had to rely on the energies of eccentric foot soldiers who seemed to come out of the woodwork and could not be properly canvassed---if organizers canvassed them at all. One of the head Wallace coordinators admitted that the lion’s share of the work in California was being done by what he described as “half-wits” and “kooks.” As the biographer Dan Carter put it in his excellent life of Wallace, The Politics of Rage, “Several recruits, who recounted grim warnings of communist conspiracies and the dangers of water fluoridation, seemed more like mental outpatients than political activists.”

An unmistakable paramilitary streak ran through the ranks. In one telling anecdote, Carter reports that Tom Turnipseed, a Wallace campaign staffer, flew in from Birmingham to meet with one of the Los Angeles district coordinators and was surprised to hear the man boast that he was going out “on maneuvers” over the weekend. When Turnipseed inquired if he was in the National Guard, the gung-ho coordinator replied, “Naw, we got our own group,” and then he led Trunipseed out to his car to show him the small arsenal of weapons in his trunk---including a machine gun and two bazookas. Alarmed, Turnipseed asked him what he and his “group” were arming themselves against. The man, thinking the answer was rather obvious, said, “The Rockefeller interests---you know, the Trilateral Commission.”

Those were the kinds of people [Ray] found himself working with in late 1967, and though he did not fraternize with them much, he seemed to fit right in with this loose confederacy of misfits…